Jo Ann Callis: Other Rooms

A student of Heinecken at UCLA, Callis offers a female counterpoint to his work: She teases us with sexuality through provocative poses, skin altered by lipstick and binding, relics of fetishes, and another's roving hands. - American Photo

Callis helped pioneer studio photography into its full, chromatic potential. She was among the first to blur interiors with interiority in a manner both uncanny and unutterable, like the moment a song shifts from major to minor key, or a scene from a dream in which you can't name the face, but you know exactly whom you are with. Her picture's aren't coquettish; there isn't any cheeckiness to her suggstions. There is only an odd arousal, an absolute command of the strange. - Dazed

The images present a bloodless eroticism, uncanny, simultaneously sexual and absented of desire. - American Suburbx

Callis' body of work doesn't just speak to hidden desires; it is also candid and almost unsettlingly sensuous in its fragmented treatment of the body, existing in a detached, dreamlike state of timelessness without definitive context. - Interview

Callis' lavishly saturated Cibachromes of cinematic, painstakingly composed tableaux of food, the body, and everyday objects play with surrealism and tease the subconscious, oftentimes set within the domestic space and dealing with tropes of femininity. - Interview

Her imagery feels deliciously voyeuristic, with many of her subjects' faces obscured, or just a ash of bound flesh in frame. Callis invites us to peer in on a private tableau, and praise the power of the body. - Flare